A few coloring reflections

I love to color. When you mix the quiet, reflective, introverted nature in me with my need to feel creative, I could spend hours each day with a simple coloring book and a little peace and quiet. There's something so therapeutic about adding color to a blank page, taking a black and white surface and making it come alive with whatever colors you choose. It gives you a sense of control, while at the same time giving your mind time to just think and reflect. 

This particular page really got me thinking. 

The thought of the mission field fascinated me as a child and adolescent. I always craved simplicity, spent a lot of quiet time alone with the Lord, and longed to travel to other parts of the world to spread the gospel.

As a young teenager, I babysat two children born to a couple who had met in Ecuador. I wondered, "Maybe God will send me to Ecuador someday."

Around the same time, my brother brought two beautiful Dominican young women into my life, who became my spiritual sisters over time. They talked about their country all the time and taught me so much about the Spanish language. Perhaps God had a plan for me in the Dominican Republic?

My senior year in high school, after four years of Spanish classes, I finally stepped out of my own country for a week-long mission trip to a little town called Tasquillo, Hidalgo in Mexico. I remember standing alone on a balcony looking out into the mountain landscape and watching a funeral procession walk down the street, thinking to myself, "I'll be back."

I very naturally fell in love with the Spanish language and could hardly wait to see where God might take me as a vocational missionary after graduating college, though I felt pretty confident He'd lead me to either Central or South America.  

At first I thought  I'd teach in a missionary school, and then later I wondered about teaching English as a Second Language overseas. (Nursing also crossed my mind, but I hated science classes, so that didn't last long.) I majored in Christian Ministries with a cross-cultural focus, while taking a few extra classes in the education and psychology field. My junior year, I boarded a plane in Chicago with a new friend from Grace College, and we landed in Buenos Aires, Argentina to live as exchange students with two different Christian families. I'd be there for the following semester with the sole purpose of taking my Spanish to a near-fluent level. My friend had committed to stay for the entire year. While there, I met and grew close to many missionary families who helped lead the church we attended there. 

On one of my final weekends in Argentina, I traveled with several of the young people from the church to Cordoba, a much more rural town, to attend a Word of Life youth missions conference. Almost all of the speakers came from the United States, so I heard every message twice, first in English, then translated into Spanish. One speaker's words impacted me deeply, and I still remember them today, 21 years later. In fact, they are the only words I remember from the entire conference.

"We've got to be at the point where we stop saying, 'I'm dying to stay, but I'm willing to go!' Rather we need to be able to honestly say to God, 'I'm dying to go, but I'm willing to stay." The point was about surrendering our hearts to go, no matter what. I remember thinking, 'I'm ready, God! Send me!' But I feel God imprinted those words on my heart for another reason, though I wouldn't understand why for many more years.

I came home from Argentina a few weeks later speaking so much more Spanish than before, realizing my whole world had just multiplied. During the following semester, I worked part-time in the evenings teaching English as a Second Language to students from all over the world. Six months later, my fiance and I boarded another plane in Chicago, this time dropping us off for two long months in Mexico, the same place where I'd stood on the balcony and thought to myself, "I'll be back."

We worked as summer intern missionaries, living alongside two missionary families, one American, one native of Mexico. Mike worked maintenance and building projects, while I taught English as a Second Language to local people in the community and led crafts for Bible School. The couple we lived with mentored us as a soon-to-be-married couple, ready to dive into the mission field. They taught us how to live a surrendered, simplistic life and showed us first hand how you can never outgive God. I was pretty sure we'd found our spot and once again assumed God would bring us back.

The following year I graduated, we got married, and we started our simple life together with the hopes of heading back to Mexico within five or so years after paying off school loans. 

That's also the semester that God opened up a job for me as an ESL teacher/para-professional in a school system that suddenly had a huge influx of Spanish-speaking students. 

I absolutely fell in love with my students. I'd always imagined myself teaching English to Spanish-speaking children, but my imagination had always taken me off to another country. I never thought about the fact that God would bring them to me, here in my own country. 

My husband and I switched to another church in the area where many Argentine families had congregated, including some of the missionaries I'd met in my church in Argentina, and even my Argentine pastor's son's family who lived right down the road from me.  They'd begun a new ministry to reach out to the Hispanic population in our community, and I even had the privilege of taking some of my students to church with me for the weekly AWANA program.

Every week as we walked out of our church doors, we read the sign above the door saying, "You are now entering the mission field."

Perhaps God had used all of my cross-cultural trainings and experiences, along with my degree and passion for ministry, solely to prepare me for the mission field that existed all around me. 

But God must have sat back and laughed at me, thinking, "Oh, dear child. I have so much more planned for your life. I'm just getting started. Hold on."

Hold on, I did. As I suddenly and unexpectedly watched all my plans turn to chaos, my marriage come to near ruin, our finances spin out of control, and my hopes for a life of ministry shatter.

I thought I'd done everything right, so how could God let such disaster come upon my home? 

My boss noticed the look of despair on my face and said, "Rachelle, I'm praying for your miracle." I held on tight to that encouragement.

Then out of the blue, when I thought things couldn't get any worse, God whisked us from Indiana to Texas for me to start a position teaching more bilingual children, but this time in both English and Spanish, and for a teaching salary rather than a paraprofessional one. And for the last 15 years, I've worked with children from the same families in the same school and have become a very solid part of their lives. Children from the U.S., from Mexico, from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and even Colombia. I had one student with a parent from Argentina, and another student with parents from Tasquillo, Hidalgo in Mexico.  

Over the last 15 years, we've been part of a church that has given our family the opportunities to go on mission trips to tell about Jesus in Piedras Negras, Mexico, Michoacan, Mexico, San Jose, California, and in Guatemala. When we came back from each mission trip, the pictures that stood out to everyone were pictures of the kids we served, all with darker skin, dark hair, and dark brown eyes. Yet to me, those children didn't look any different than the students I got to love on and teach every single day during the year.

Our son David has had opportunities to participate on mission trips to serve a homeless population in Waco, Texas, to work with a new church in Colorado, to help new church plants in Los Angeles and Burbank, California, to lead 5-Day Clubs in Arlington, Texas, and to work out in the heat to help improve the living conditions of families living in the Rio Grande Valley here in Texas. As a family, we've met and served alongside missionaries in a Christian school in Bogota, Colombia, where we also visited an orphanage, supported an orphan as he became an adult, and adopted our son. 

I've led women's Bible studies in my church for the last ten years, ministering to the very heart of the home, making a difference in entire famlies by teaching women how to make prayer and the Word a priority in their lives. I've helped other women learn to pray for their husbands as I learned to pray for mine. I've written blogs and books about grief, loss, and God's redeeming power. I published my books with a ministry (ABH) that continues to reach hundreds of people in Africa because of their obedience to follow God to Tanzania and make an impact there. Though my books are not books they take to Africa with them, by being published under their name, I consider myself a partner in their ministry. 

And just a year and a half ago, I got to take a pair of my books to Spain, continuing to minister to others, one person at a time,  by sharing my own struggles and the faith I cling to through them.

Looking back, I can see that the things God allowed to disravel in my life that made me think disqualified me for the ministry He'd called me to actually served to equip me for the ministries He had planned for me. He turned the very things that I wanted to erase from my timeline into my greatest assets to minister and connect with others. 

Just a few weeks ago, my friend from Buenos Aires, Argentina traveled to Cordoba and posted pictures of this year's current youth mission conference, and those words from the mission conference of 1997 came flooding back to me. "I'm dying to go, but I'm willing to stay." 

Less than a month before that conference in 1997, my son was born in Bogota, Colombia, though I woudn't meet him for another ten years and adopt him yet five years after that. 

If I had "forced my way" onto a foreign mission field as a vocational missionary, I would have missed him. And so much more. I'm so glad He called me to stay.

Now Tuesday morning I get to go back to my dark skinned, dark-eyed, Spanish-speaking children and breathe life into them. Every day with them is a blessing, even on the long, hard, frustrating days of dealing with the public educational system. I love what I do and the families I get to work with and be part of.

See where a day of coloring will take me? Like I said, it's so therapeutic at times. A wonderful, peaceful way to reflect on life.